Litchfield Art Consultant Redefines Landscape Paintings For The Home

The buildings in Maureen Gallace's "Late Afternoon" (2010), featured in Lauren P. Della Monica's new book, are pared down to their essence, devoid of windows, doors or other architectural features.

The buildings in Maureen Gallace's "Late Afternoon" (2010), featured in Lauren P. Della Monica's new book, are pared down to their essence, devoid of windows, doors or other architectural features. (From "Painted Landscapes: Contemporary Views")

Sarah McKenzie, a Connecticut native who graduated from Yale, offers a bright and precise aerial view of urban sprawl in "Scrim" (2010). The crisp geometry of the buildings and architectural details plays against the softness of the color palette, evoking warm sunshine filtered through a window...

Sarah McKenzie, a Connecticut native who graduated from Yale, offers a bright and precise aerial view of urban sprawl in "Scrim" (2010). The crisp geometry of the buildings and architectural details plays against the softness of the color palette, evoking warm sunshine filtered through a window... (From "Painted Landscapes: Contemporary Views")

Lauren P. Della Monica writes that Paul Resika's graphic landscapes are comprised of flat planes of color in geometric forms, grounded in realism by color choice. But in "Dark Island" (2006-2007), he veers away from realism, choosing yellow for the sky and green for the sea.

Lauren P. Della Monica writes that Paul Resika's graphic landscapes are comprised of flat planes of color in geometric forms, grounded in realism by color choice. But in "Dark Island" (2006-2007), he veers away from realism, choosing yellow for the sky and green for the sea. (From "Painted Landscapes: Contemporary Views")

Two landscape paintings hang side by side in the New Britain Museum of American Art. One is Frederic Edwin Church's "West Rock, New Haven," his peaceful, pastoral 1849 view of a famed Connecticut landmark. A few farmers are seen haying a field, and in the distance a classic white church steeple sticks up slightly above the trees.

Next to Church's painting hangs Valerie Hegarty's "West Rock Branches," created in 2012. In her painting — really, almost a sculpture — Hegarty has quite faithfully recreated Church's scene, but the painting is then scorched and torn and smeared in places. The frame is blotched with dark globs that look like black tar, and branches seem to have taken root and grown out of the painting, dragging fragments of the broken frame with it.

Museums and galleries are a home away from home for art consultant and author Lauren Della Monica, and when we looked at the two landscapes of West Rock, it became clear why she had chosen the New Britain museum for us to talk about her new book and about choosing landscape paintings for one's home.

Many of the paintings Della Monica features in "Painted Landscapes: Contemporary Views" (Schiffer Publishing, 272 pages, $49.99) show humans' mark upon the landscape.

"It's not always a rosy view," Della Monica says, noting that concerns about pollution, depleted resources, overdevelopment and other destructive forces on the landscape — how humans have used and abused the land — are bound to be reflected in many contemporary artists' work.

Della Monica, 39, who divides her time between New York City and a 1773 home in Litchfield, observes that some artists depict unflinchingly realistic images — Katherine Taylor's bleak, almost post-apocalyptic scenes of swimming pools, for example, "take us to eerie places where perhaps we would never want to be..."

Other contemporary painters present romanticized or nostalgic versions of a landscape — "the way the artist wants it to be, or the way they remember it from the past," Della Monica says. "These are the choices artists make." Suzanne Siminger's and Arturo Chavez's paintings of the Grand Canyon, for example, capture its grandeur in an idealized way, devoid of the human stamp of buildings and cars and destruction.

Della Monica devotes a full quarter of her book to "Urban Views," writing that "Oftentimes a landscape is not so pristine and the view is not so green." Some of these works are pleasing cityscapes that would be easy to live with; others are more challenging — focused on the visual cacophony of screaming electronic billboards or the blinding blur of headlights and neon shop lights seen through a windshield at night.

The book stretches the definition of "landscape," with some of the contemporary artists Della Monica features turning their eye on suburban sprawl, aging industrial settings or a stretch of highway. There's Richard Estes' meticulously detailed "Upper West Side Street with Scaffolding" and Rackstraw Downes' "Obsolete Gas Tanks Awaiting Demolition II." Katherine Lee's unsettling "Exterior" series includes landscapes of the backside of a Toys "R" Us store, a traffic signal over a parking lot devoid of cars, and the glowering sky over an empty roadway and unfinished construction project.

Just as Hegarty's painting makes far more sense if you know what came before — Church's painting — Della Monica opens each chapter with a brief historical recap, to help the reader understand references that the living artists make to the past.

"You really can't look at contemporary artists in a vacuum," she says.

A Lack Of Prestige?

Della Monica says that in the traditional hierarchy of painting, landscape paintings ranked pretty low, lacking the prestige of portraiture and historic painting.

"They were sort of quaint, kind of quotidian — while very pretty, not important in the history of art," she says. "But landscape paintings really appealed to everyone, and many, many, many more artists do landscape paintings than anything else."

An art consultant for 18 years, Della Monica says that as she works with clients to build art collections, she has realized that "everybody eventually at some point is drawn to a landscape painting. It can be any style."

The paintings in her book include a mix of superstar contemporary artists and lesser-knowns, and many of the works are highly abstract.

"I started the project probably intending to do a narrower view of what landscape painting was," Della Monica says, "but it would be pretty boring if it were only realist and impressionist views out the window."

Asked what she hopes a reader will gain from her book, Della Monica says one of her aims is to re-elevate landscape paintings. (Her motive was similar in "Flying The Colors," a book she co-authored in 2009 on 19th-century American maritime art.)

"I want everybody to find something they like, and, hopefully, be surprised by that," she says. "A lot of people who like very cutting-edge abstract art might think they don't like landscapes."

She also wanted to remind the art market of the appeal of landscape paintings.

"Landscapes, although not considered as sexy and cutting-edge, are actually a big part of the market. That was another part of my idea, to say, 'Slow down, art market, it doesn't need to all be so cutting-edge and abstract as installation video pieces you see at Art Basel.' A lot of people are doing relatively traditional work that has a big impact on the art market."

Choosing Art

Della Monica says the clients she typically works with — "and I'm generalizing" — tend to be couples who are highly educated and successful in their own professions but "who know that they haven't figured out the art market and don't want to make a costly mistake."

What makes it interesting, she says, is that they are choosing art not merely as an investment; they also want to live with it.

"They tend to want to learn about connoisseurship, instead of just buying an assortment of paintings and putting them on the wall," says Della Monica, who also used to give art history lectures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

"I sort of act like a teacher, a personal curator," she says. "I'm helping these people figure out what they want to collect. And then we find it."

When choosing art for one's home, it helps when there's an organizing principle, she says, but being "true to what you love" is paramount.

"There's always this tension with really good collectors between the investment value — Am I paying the right place? Am I getting a good deal? Is this going to stand the test of time? Am I making a good financial decision? — then on the other end of that tug of war is that passion, that emotional response. They want to really love it. It's something they're going to see all the time. A painting — it becomes part of your life."

She says she's been surprised at how many of her clients actually are drawn to some of the more difficult urban landscapes in her book.

And context matters.

Della Monica described her recent choice of a very colorful painting by London painter Charlotte Evans for Litchfield clients. The painting — done over a wash of red, which gives it great depth and vibrancy — is of a house and its reflection, possibly on snow or in water.

The decor in the clients' home is otherwise almost entirely white, "very clean and modern," with dark brown wood, and the transformation with just one piece of art was remarkable, Della Monica says.

"The painting is the only thing that has all that color," Della Monica says. "It really changed the whole environment. It draws the eye in a new way. Sometimes art can shake things up, for the better. It changed the whole space."